Friday, May 31, 2013

Cheerios, breakfast of champions

WHO KNEW that whole grains, sugar, flavorings, vitamin E and a smidgen of advertising could be so combustible? Those are the ingredients of a bomb of a controversy that’s roiling the comment sections of blogs and Web sites ... and showing us, sadly, that if you want to find out how much some people hate, and how fast they can prove it, there’s nothing like the Internet.

By now, you’ve seen it, the Cheerios video that’s everywhere. Its basic human components — mommy, daddy, impossibly cute little kid(s) — you’ve seen a thousand times. But in the newest one, “Just Checking,” the folks at Cheerios (and at Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency that created the ad) have gutsily tweaked the family equation to reflect the times we live in. You already know how:

Let the hating begin. No sooner than the ad turned up on the Cheerios YouTube page than a torrent of racist-troll bile began, the comments coming so thick, fast and mean that the page’s comments had to be disabled and scrubbed.

From a purely commercial perspective, the ad did what ads are supposed to do. You Tube view counts of “Just Checking” have swamped those of every other Cheerios You Tube ad-videos on the page, by orders of magnitude. At this writing, it’s been viewed more than 635,000 times in the last three days.

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BUT THE ad did something else. It opened a window into how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go as a society. Even the casual student of modern American history knows that it wasn’t so long ago in our lifetimes that such unions as the one depicted in the Cheerios ad were flat out against the law.

Until Loving v. Virginia, the momentous 1967 Supreme Court decision prohibiting laws that barred marriage between the races, interracial couples walked a grim and sometimes tragic existential tightrope in a society that wasn’t nearly ready for that reveal of the romantic experience. Back then, Cheerios wouldn’t have dared to release an ad like that.

Then was then and now is now. We’re four and a half years into life with the first African American president in the nation’s history; a decade at least into a reordering of the country’s historical demographic hegemony. We live in a time when people have let go of that poisonous past. We also live in a time when, simply put, some people haven’t.

For all the outright hatred of the ad campaign — associations with Nazis, and the words “racial genocide,” “troglodytes” were some of the tamer flames — the ad’s generated an equally broad expression of gratitude, and (finally) recognition of the biracial experience from a major corporate player, part of a business world that remains largely risk-averse on matters of company branding and image.

AGAINST all the odds today, people showed they understand right from wrong. The Cheerios Facebook page just topped 1 billion likes. And some weren’t afraid to fire back at the trolls with equal brio. On the SuperHeroHype forum site page about the ad and its reaction, chamber-music, from the United Kingdom, let fly: “Mostly morons post comments on YouTube so it’s not a surprise. Most of those racist knuckle draggers wouldn't have the balls to say the stuff they post in real life or to peoples of colours faces. Typical Internet cowardly racists.”

In a statement, Camille Gibson, Cheerios vice president of marketing, said “[c]onsumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all.” Can I get a billion witnesses.

The new Cheerios ad asks us to buy cereal. It wouldn’t be much of an ad if it didn’t. But in a sweetly sly way, a way that’s no more benignly subversive than any other ad on television, it’s asking us something else. Something that’s more about character than cholesterol: “Hey America — is your heart healthy? Is it in the right place?

Shameless Self-Promotion II

America from 2004 to 2009 – its new ironies and old habits, its capacity for change – is topic A in this collection of essays and blog posts on popular culture, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, a transformative election, and the first 100 days of the Obama administration. | Now available at Authorhouse

shameless self-promotion

One nation subject to change: A collection of topical essays exploring television, hip-hop, patriotism, the use of language under Bush II, and the author's own reckoning with mortality. | Available at Authorhouse

A veteran journalist, producer and blogger, Michael Eric Ross is a frequent contributor to the content channels of Jerrick Media, and a periodic contributor to TheWrap, a major online source of entertainment news and analysis. He writes from Los Angeles on the arts, politics, race and ethnicity, and pop culture. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he's worked as a reporter, editor and critic at several newspapers and websites, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, MSN, Current and NBCNews.com. He was formerly an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, PopMatters, Salon, The Root, seattlepi.com, NPR.com, theGrio, BuzzFeed, Medium and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003); and essay collections Interesting Times (2004) and American Bandwidth (2009), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (edited by Ishmael Reed, 1997) and Soul Food (2000).